Comment on “Evaluating Recipes for Development Success”: The Policy Usefulness of Institutional and Political Analyses of Development

efforts to identify the “fundamental ” causes of development and to distill policy rec-ommendations from these efforts. This comment focuses on the strand of that litera-ture related to institutions and development. Two arguments are important: that the rule of law and the security of property rights are important for growth and that they are the product of political institutions. Professor Dixit argues that identification and other concerns undermine the second argument and inhibit the formulation of policy recommendations. While these concerns are valid, research has begun to disag-gregate broad political institutions (democracy and autocracy) and to look at the details of political competition, such as voter information and politician credibility, which are both more robust determinants of political decision-making and more susceptible to policy interventions. JEL codes: O43, O17, O20, P30, P48. Avinash Dixit reviews many of the recent contributions to the literature that examine the “big ” questions in economic development, particularly those con-cerning the fundamental differences between countries that manage to sustain rapid economic growth and those that do not. In this compact and concise review Professor Dixit offers a critical assessment of this literature. He concludes by suggesting that academic development economists should refrain from offering country-specific policy prescriptions. Practitioners can nevertheless learn from the generalizations that academic research yields, but they should examine the plausibility of those generalizations, taking into account the many idiosyncrasie